507 Milliseconds From Minsk to Rarotonga: A Packet's Journey Through Moscow, Vienna, Los Angeles, and Tahiti

Based on RIPE Atlas measurements from GeoCables monitoring infrastructure, April 2026.

Our monitor in Minsk measures the latency from Belarus to Rarotonga, the capital of the Cook Islands, once an hour. The average round-trip time across seventeen recent measurements is 507 milliseconds. Peak observations reach 1,314 milliseconds — a packet takes well over a second to travel from Minsk to the central atoll of a Pacific nation of seventeen thousand people, and back. The minimum physically achievable latency, if light could travel in a straight line through the earth's crust between the two points, is 140 milliseconds. Everything beyond that is routing — the decisions, contracts, and cables that collectively determine how an IP packet actually crosses the planet.

This piece is an anatomy of those 507 milliseconds. The route involves six countries, at least five submarine and terrestrial cable systems, and a handful of internet carriers that most people outside the industry have never heard of. It is also a quiet story about how the global internet — despite being imagined as a flat, borderless network — is shaped in practice by specific historical decisions made by national telecommunications operators, transit providers, and the submarine cable consortia that physically connect one landmass to another.

The traceroute

Here is a representative run, with cumulative round-trip times from Minsk to each hop:

Each row is one step on the packet's journey. The RTT number is the time from Minsk to that hop and back. A well-engineered hop adds a small, bounded increment; the last hop in this trace adds over a full second on top of the previous one, which tells us something about what happens at the end of the path in the Cook Islands. We will come back to that.

Step 1: Out of Minsk

The packet leaves our probe's local network and enters Belarus's commercial internet at AS12406 Business Network Ltd, a private Belarusian ISP. Two hops later it is handed to AS60280 — the Republican Unitary Enterprise National Traffic Exchange Centre, which is Belarus's state-controlled traffic exchange. This is a structural feature of the Belarusian internet: commercial carriers hand off to a single state entity before international egress. The routing is built around Beltelecom, the state incumbent telecommunications operator that has held monopoly control over Belarus's international gateway infrastructure for decades.

From Minsk the packet travels a short terrestrial fibre hop east-northeast to Moscow, where it enters AS12389 Rostelecom — the Russian state-owned telecommunications operator. This is the first transit network to carry the packet out of the CIS region. Belarus has alternative paths through Poland and Lithuania into the European internet, but those paths are commercially more expensive and historically less developed; for most international traffic, the default route out of Belarus runs through Rostelecom's Moscow transit fabric. For a packet destined for the Pacific, that means one extra intermediate carrier — but it is what exists.

Step 2: Across Europe to Vienna

From Moscow, the packet heads west-southwest to Vienna, on the network of AS9002 RETN Limited — a pan-European transit carrier with substantial presence across the former Soviet Union and eastern Europe. RETN hands the packet off to AS3257 GTT Communications, a global American-owned Tier-1 transit carrier that will carry it all the way across the Atlantic and the North American continent to the Pacific. The Vienna-to-Vienna hop in the table — where the packet appears to pass through Vienna twice on two different networks — is not a geographic loop; it is a peering handoff between two carriers at the same internet exchange. Packets do this all the time. What looks like a detour is actually a contractual boundary.

The 68 milliseconds at this point already reflects considerable routing overhead. A direct Minsk-Vienna great-circle path is approximately 1,500 kilometres; pure fibre latency would be around 15 ms. The packet has added about 50 ms by this point from carrier internal paths, queueing, and the handoffs between Business Network, Beltelecom, Rostelecom, RETN, and GTT. Each transition between carriers involves router table lookups, encapsulation changes, and often a physical traversal through internet-exchange switching fabric.

Step 3: Transatlantic and transcontinental

From Vienna, GTT carries the packet across the Atlantic to Los Angeles. This is the single longest leg in physical distance — approximately 10,000 kilometres of fibre through undersea cable systems across the North Atlantic and then across the continental United States. The accumulated RTT at Los Angeles is 193 ms. About 100 ms of that is the Atlantic crossing itself; the rest is the continental US traverse plus router processing.

GTT's choice to route via Los Angeles rather than, for instance, New York or Miami, is dictated by the next leg. There are no commercial submarine cables that go directly from the Atlantic seaboard of the United States to the South Pacific. If you want to reach Tahiti or the Cook Islands from anywhere east of Hawaii, you have to first reach the US Pacific coast. The Pacific cable network has its major interconnection points in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Seattle — every trans-Pacific cable from North America terminates at one of these three hubs.

Step 4: Pacific crossing to Tahiti

From Los Angeles, the packet crosses the Pacific Ocean to Papeete, the capital of French Polynesia, adding another 100 milliseconds to the cumulative total. The trans-Pacific distance between LA and Tahiti is approximately 6,500 kilometres, and the cable infrastructure that carries this traffic is a small number of dedicated systems. Honotua (2010, owned by French Polynesia's state operator OPT) runs from Tahiti to Hawaii, and from Hawaii to the US mainland the packet rides other trans-Pacific systems. The net effect is a single GTT-operated path from Los Angeles straight into Tahiti's internet infrastructure.

Papeete is where the packet enters the local carrier network. AS9471 ONATI (Office des Postes et Télécommunications de la Polynésie française) is the state operator that handles nearly all international internet traffic for French Polynesia. For traffic destined for the Cook Islands, ONATI is the last international-carrier handoff point before the packet enters the regional Cook Islands system.

Step 5: Manatua to Rarotonga

The final submarine cable on this journey is Manatua, the 3,634-kilometre cable that connects French Polynesia to the Cook Islands, Niue, and Samoa. Commissioned in 2020 and jointly owned by Avaroa Cable Ltd. (Cook Islands), OPT French Polynesia, Telecom Niue, and Samoa Submarine Cable Company, Manatua was the first submarine cable ever to reach the Cook Islands. Before 2020, Cook Islands internet users depended entirely on geostationary satellite connectivity — which meant that every packet in and out of the country experienced at least 500 milliseconds of round-trip time just from the satellite link, before any of the routing overhead we have been discussing was added.

On modern fibre, the Papeete-to-Rarotonga leg is about 1,100 kilometres of cable and should contribute approximately 15 milliseconds to the round-trip time. In the ideal case, our Minsk-to-Rarotonga packet should arrive with a cumulative RTT in the range of 310–320 ms. In our 17 recent measurements, the average is 507 ms — approximately 180 ms higher than the pure-fibre physics allows.

The final second

Where does the extra latency come from? The last hop in our representative traceroute adds over a full second on top of the Papeete arrival — from 294 ms to 1,314 ms. This is not the cable. Manatua is a modern 16-fibre-pair cable with plenty of capacity, and its RTT from Papeete to Rarotonga is bounded by physics at around 15 ms. What happens at the Cook Islands edge, though, is what happens at any small-island internet edge: the local carrier's network equipment is less redundant than continental equipment, local peering is minimal, and when the edge router receives a traceroute probe it sometimes rate-limits the response, holding the ICMP reply in a queue before emitting it.

This is why different measurements of the same path produce very different total RTTs. Our 507-ms average includes measurements where the final hop behaved politely and added its proper 15 ms, and measurements where the edge router deferred the ICMP response by hundreds of milliseconds to prioritise genuine user traffic. The actual user-facing latency — for loading a web page from Europe to a Cook Islands web server — is closer to our 310-to-350-ms lower bound than to the 507-ms average.

What a Cook Islands packet actually rides on

To summarise, a Minsk-Rarotonga packet travels through:

1. Beltelecom's Belarus-to-Moscow terrestrial trunk.
2. Rostelecom's Moscow-to-Europe terrestrial fibre.
3. RETN's Vienna peering with GTT.
4. GTT's transatlantic submarine cables to the US East Coast, plus GTT's continental US backbone to Los Angeles.
5. A trans-Pacific submarine cable — in this path, operated by GTT's peering partnerships into the Hawaii-Tahiti corridor.
6. Honotua from Hawaii to Tahiti.
7. Manatua from Tahiti to Rarotonga.

Five distinct submarine cable systems, three continental fibre carriers, four national operators, and two small-island-nation telecom incumbents. This is the infrastructure behind one round-trip ping.

What happens when one cable goes down

Manatua has had faults. Our monitoring has previously captured a 2024 event where a single-fibre fault on Manatua caused outbound traffic from Rarotonga to reroute via backup satellite links, raising the observable RTT on our Minsk-Rarotonga path above 1,800 milliseconds for several days. During the outage, the underlying physical infrastructure that carries Pacific island traffic reverts to what Cook Islands had before 2020: a geostationary satellite link, which adds at least 500 ms of pure round-trip time regardless of what the rest of the path does. The 17,000 residents of Rarotonga, Aitutaki, and the other Cook Islands get their internet through a single cable, and when that cable has a problem, the whole country feels it at once.

This is a specific vulnerability of small island internet. Any major landmass has many cables arriving from many directions, and the failure of one is noticed only by carriers watching dashboards. For the Cook Islands, the failure of Manatua is immediately visible in every web page load and every video call. The 507-ms baseline we measure today is the good-case scenario. The bad case — satellite fallback — is five times slower.

Conclusion: internet geography is not physical geography

A straight line from Minsk to Rarotonga is 16,000 kilometres; traversing a straight-line path in glass fibre would take approximately 160 milliseconds round-trip. Our actual measurement is 507 ms. The difference — 340 milliseconds — is the price of going through the commercial internet rather than over it directly. The packet must follow cable routes that exist, not the routes we would build if geography were the only constraint. It must hand off between carriers at specific peering points. It must reach the Pacific via the US West Coast because no cable goes more directly. And it must cross the Manatua cable — the single piece of infrastructure that connects the Cook Islands to the rest of the world.

For most global internet users, this invisible architecture is irrelevant: their traffic takes the path the internet provides, and the path is fast enough. For the users at the edge — the 17,000 people of the Cook Islands, but also the population of every small island nation in the Pacific, the Indian Ocean, and the Caribbean — the architecture is everything. Their lived experience of the internet is shaped by which cables exist, which carriers peer with which other carriers, and which one cable provides their connection to the larger network. Our 507-millisecond measurement is, in that sense, not a number about Belarus or about routing. It is a number about Rarotonga.

Try it yourself

The live Belarus-Cook-Islands latency data is visible on our Minsk-Rarotonga route page. For related analyses see Jerusalem to the Cook Islands (the same destination from a different origin, with a different path), The Pacific Islands' Internet Paradox, and the Manatua cable profile. Our measurements refresh every two hours.